For many businesses, remote working was a saving grace. The ability for people to self-isolate and keep working meant companies could operate during the pandemic. In April 2020, the Office for National Statistics estimated around 46.6% of the UK did some of their work from home.

And with remote working came new habits and new processes, creating new ways for people to live and work. While it may have been a necessary revolution, the question now is whether those changes will persist post-Covid.

To find out more about the future of remote working, and which companies could benefit most from it, DIGIT spoke with Ben Stephenson, CEO & Founder of remote-first traveltech company, Impala.

Impala started as a remote-first company before the pandemic. Coming from an engineering background, Stephenson was familiar with working remotely.

“No one could convince me that there was an advantage to being in-person,” Stephenson said.

The main motivation for making Impala remote first was how often its employees were travelling. It is this distinction, he noted – that remote working is not always working from home – that is a key benefit. It allows workers to travel while still working, whether its meeting people, or as part of a working holiday.

Remote Possibility

During the Covid crisis, many companies proved keen to offer remote working post-pandemic. A Gartner survey from 2020 said that 82% of responding companies planned to allow employees to continue with some form of remote working, with 47% offering it all the time.

This has proven popular with workers. A recent report found that 75% of UK office workers said they would take a pay cut to continue remote working.

“Most people want to have a hybrid experience,” Stephenson said. “They want to be in the office sometimes to avoid being sat at home the entire time. They also want to get out of their immediate environment, whether that’s two or three days a week.”

To that end, several large companies were quick to back continued remote and hybrid working. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said half of the company’s employees could eventually be remote working on a permanent basis.

However, the reality has seen several companies backtracking, or adding caveats. Apple, for example, will require its employees to work three days per week in-office from September. The company’s argument is that in-person collaboration is a vital part of its culture.

Meanwhile, Google has approved 85% of employee requests to work remotely or relocate, making it one of the largest companies to try hybrid working. That said, it has also said that it cut wages for remote workers.

Flexibility

It seems that there is something of a contest between employers and employees on remote working. While workers prefer the flexibility offered by remote working, along with reduced commute times, many companies are still hesitant to embrace long-term remote working.

Hybrid work is generally seen as the compromise, aiming to get the best of both worlds. This includes fixed schedules with specified number of specific days. However, a set workweek does not take full advantage of the flexibility offered by remote working.

“I share a similar scepticism of a fixed in-office day schedule,” Stephenson explained. “The reason that people really enjoy remote working is not because they want to sit at home – it’s part of it- but it’s also so that they can work from anywhere in the world if they want to go away on a long weekend.

“If you’re blindly treating remote as work from home, which is what you’re doing when you mandate that you need to be in the office on these days, then I think it’s the worst of both worlds.”

He added: “Companies are going to see lower engagement from employees because companies are going to set certain days and employees are going to vote with their feet as to whether they want to have the flexibility that they need.

Maintaining Culture

As the saying in business goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. One of the commonly cited challenges around remote working is creating a workplace culture. The conventional thinking goes that, without in-person interactions, the opportunities to define a distinct company culture are gone.

“I don’t think that that’s a particularly big problem,” Stephenson said. “I think that most companies fail at building strong cultures, anyway, regardless of whether they’re in person or not.”

Culture, he notes, is how a company feels and behaves and acts when there are no defined processes in place for a specific task.

“For us, we tried to steer and shape a culture and to do that you have to have a conversation with your organisation – who are we, what do we want to be, where are we failing, where are we doing well.

“Now that is easier in-person, but you can do it by Zoom. What people confuse culture for is trust and community – those things are very hard to build. Building community for us was really tricky during pandemic. Going from a world where you can hop on a flight to go meet a team member wherever they might be to having to do it on a video platform, that’s really tough.”

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While the last year of remote working has proven that people can work remotely and still be productive and efficient, there are still debates about whether people can still be creative. People point to the loss of chance encounters, moments where people bounce ideas off each and have moments of spontaneous collaboration.

“People always ask whether that eliminates the serendipity that you have, bumping into people in the hallway. And I wonder where all these companies are where all these ideas are created by two people accidentally meeting in the hallway,” he said.

“I think ideation comes from individuals from group settings that happen fairly naturally in any kind of company.

“So I think that the serendipity is a crutch relied on by old school managers that don’t really want to think in depth about what how to run a company in the 21st century.”

Who Benefits?

While remote working may be a revolution, it will not be a revolution that benefits everyone. Hybrid working may well prove to be a luxury for a select few – highly educated, well-paid professionals.

For most workers across many services jobs, including hospitality, customer service and logistics, they will continue being rooted to their place of work. This accounts for almost half of all workers, according to McKinsey.

“I don’t think that remote is the future of work – I think it is a future of work for some people,” Stephenson said.

With the Delta variant extending restrictions in some nations, the debate surrounding the future of remote working is also being extended.

“We’ll figure out what the future of work actually truly looks like now that we’re in an environment where people who run companies can mandate returns to offices.”